Our age of schizophrenic and hypertrophied globalization makes a quaint memory of the regionalism that once structured the novel, particularly in Latin America. Argentina’s bourgeoisie (for which I am a case study) can be found studying at liberal arts colleges in the Northeastern United States, picking kiwis in New Zealand, or having affairs in Japan. The rich live global lives, status now an expanded game in which (properly domesticated) Third World provenance shines in the elite attempts to elide or monetize it. But Julia Kornberg’s debut, Berlin Atomized—which was originally published in Argentina in 2021—shows that one is only what one cannot avoid. No matter your fantasies of identitarian emancipation, of Jewish assimilation, or Argentine incorporation into “the First World,” history is what hurts and its pain always returns.
Kornberg’s novel, co-translated with Jack Rockwell, deals with the Goldstein siblings. They are the three scions of a wealthy, Jewish family that moves out to the gated megadevelopments of suburban Buenos Aires, far from the nuisances of the city. As they come of age and make sense of the claustrophobic faux Eden in which they were raised—the smallness of their experience in the world and the chaos that, unbeknownst to them, lingers outside the gates—they each find ways of escape into the city and the world, be it through music, love, or war. Berlin Atomized is a globetrotting romp, a contra-hegemonic assault on the bullshit of a decaying, cowardly bourgeoisie seeking comfort in a history that never quite ended and a moving, even harrowing bildungsroman.
I spoke with Kornberg and Rockwell via email to make sense of this project—written almost a decade ago—and its relevance to this moment in both Latin American and US literature.
Federico Perelmuter: How did the book come about, initially? You wrote it and eventually published it in Argentina when you were very young, right? What was the inspiration at the time?
Julia Kornberg: I first wrote this book in the South American summer of 2016–2017. I was an angsty post-teen and had spent my entire adolescence coming in and out of different circles of Buenos Aires, all of which would eventually make it into the novel. The super-rich, the artsy kids, the Trotskyist militants, and so on, they were all my friends, boyfriends, acquaintances. It might be important to say that the Goldstein siblings are from a very different world from mine: I had been to Nordelta a lot growing up, but my family was never wealthy and was very urban. I think that this position (of having very little money but maybe some cultural capital) helped me infiltrate and understand the world I was portraying. I am ashamed to say it, but I was reading a lot of literary theory at the time, a lot of Lukacs and Balzac, and I liked the idea of portraying a decaying elite as a way to speak about class that felt honest and somewhat subversive. I also wanted the Goldsteins to be very human, lost, and angry in the way that I felt that me and my friends were back then (and maybe still are).
At that time, I was twenty and wanted to write a short story collection, which is a very classic genre in Argentina. I was traveling and started conceiving Berlin as a series of individual short stories: The first one I wrote was “Gaza,” after talking to a drunk American soldier on New Year’s Eve, then I think came “Buenos Aires,” “Nordelta,” and so on. In 2017, the book won an award from the Ministry of Culture, and the judges encouraged me to read this as a potential novel. Between 2017 and 2021, which is when the book was finally published in Argentina, I worked to make the stories feel more interconnected, although the general form of the book stayed pretty much the same.
FP: A big theme is the tension between locality and the world, which almost parallels its depiction of class and of Judaism, not to mention of cities—Buenos Aires, but others around the world as well. Could you talk a little about how you understood those themes and why they felt compelling?
JK: This is an impossible question to answer, but I’ll try. I think there is a big question in Argentine and Latin American literature more broadly about what Latin American literature and Argentine literature should be—what makes us “different” from European and American letters? Is it our gauchos, our landscape, our terrible economic situation, always predicting a catastrophe in the distance? If I want to be an Argentine writer, does that mean that I have to satisfy people’s expectations of what that would mean?
Not to be a bore, but one of the most important interventions in this debate was Borges’s The Argentine Writer and Tradition. Borges argues that, in the same way that there are no camels in the Quran (only a poser would put portray camels, medjool dates, and other self-exoticizing elements in the Holy Book of Islam), an Argentine writer doesn’t have to put gauchos, guitars, and drink maté in their literature. Instead, Borges encourages Argentine writers to think of themselves in terms of the universal. And this is quite a subversive gesture: Whereas the West might want us to think of ourselves as different and peripheral, where they might urge us to portray images that fulfill their prejudices about Argentina, we can have a more universalist approach and write, essentially, about whatever we want, and it will still be Argentine literature. Being able to claim universality from our peripheral point of view is a nice “fuck you” to the unequal conditions of creation that Latin American writers have vis-à-vis European ones.
With Berlin I was interested in doing this: being able to claim different spaces of the world as fair game for Argentine literature, through the unique lens of these wealthy Argentine Jews. That situation of belonging-and-not-belonging (if you are Jewish you never feel completely Argentine, if you are Argentine you never feel completely at home anywhere else) I think helps the Goldstein siblings portray their world and even mourn it but with a distance, with some cynicism that is also part of their outsider perspective. More than actors, they are spectators of the crumbling world around them, and that was a really fun position for me to portray (not to mention one with which I identify).
FP: How was the book received there?
JK: Argentine readers were incredibly generous. The reviews were positive and it really got some very kind feedback from some writers I truly admire—Federico Falco, Paula Puebla, and the late, great Luis Chitarroni were some of my first readers. Because of how the publishing industry works there, my press only printed like 300 copies, and it sold out very fast. I don’t own any copies of my first published book, and you can’t really buy it in Argentina anymore, which I guess should be interpreted as good.
FP: What was the experience of revisiting something you’d written half a decade ago like?
JK: Very liberating. If I had to revisit something I wrote a year ago, still having an emotional attachment to it, I would be much more scathing about myself than I was with Berlin. In this case, it was calm, less anxious, like talking to my younger self: I could be compassionate with my cringiest moments, my ambitions, my very self-important and oftentimes puerile feelings, and just edit myself, allowing the book to grow without the necessity of making it something else entirely.
FP: Why did you choose to co-translate? How did you go about it? What was it like?
Jack Rockwell: Julia and I had first worked together when I translated a short story of hers, “The Health of Animals,” for Agora Mag in March 2021. Later that year, Atomizado Berlín came out. I initially approached Julia asking if I could translate the book, thinking I would move very slowly, take my time, ask lots of questions, etc. Then an editor expressed interest in seeing a sample of the translation. At the time, I had a first draft of maybe the first two chapters, and it was still really rough—we’re talking handwritten, not even typed, with half the words in brackets or starred with other possibilities, etc. So, we needed to move quickly. We got together to settle some of the questions I had and keep working on the translation, and soon it became clear that this translation was something we were doing together. Usually, I did a first draft and then Julia would spearhead the first round of revisions, though for one or two chapters it was the other way around. And then it would kind of go back and forth and we would both just be working the text until it got to a point we felt good about. There were many meetings, coffees, drinks, a live Google Doc, occasional disagreement, friends and family weighing in, and some awesome moments where one of us would suggest something and the other would say—”Oh yeah, that’s it.” It was a very cool experience and above all a lot of fun.
We finished a sample that was about half the length of the book in two or three weeks. Then that editor ended up passing on the manuscript. It lay fallow for a while—almost two years—and then Julia found an agent, who suggested a few more revisions to the sample. Then when Astra acquired the book, we had a slightly different process. We were living in different cities, and we were both a little busier then, so I translated first drafts of the rest of the chapters, revised them once, sent them to Julia, who sent them back with further revisions and comments. Then we probably went back and forth a few more times to resolve some questions and tricky bits, and then we sent it to Deborah Ghim, our editor at Astra at the time. She and Julia then developmentally edited the novel based on the English-language manuscript we had produced; at this point, I weighed in on phrasing and voice issues here and there, but mostly took a back seat.
FP: How did the book change as you translated it? I know it’s different from the Argentine edition.
JK: There are mostly small changes—turns of phrase, small characters are eliminated, maybe the biggest shift was that the ending of the Paris chapter was changed. A lot of it was done thanks to Deborah, who was the genius editor I always wish I had gotten (and probably the person who should’ve revised it way back in 2017). She really helped the book become much tighter, making sure every sentence was as polished as possible. Having studied a lot of literary translation, I think this practice is more common than we think—many of my favorite writers (Copi, Puig, Reinaldo Arenas) were also involved in their translation as re-editions, so we saw this as a playful opportunity to do the same.
FP: The translation is remarkable for its interest in blending Spanish with English and trying to preserve as much localism and specificity as possible. Why?
Jack Rockwell: I think there are a few reasons. On the one hand, that’s very much how the Spanish-language editions of the book were. Atomizado Berlín is full of stray words and phrases in French, German, and English. Sometimes this has a grounding effect, connecting a speaker or an idea to a specific place, tradition, or even an individual writer. Other times, it’s more playful, teasing or mocking a character who shows off their class status by their (usually shaky) command of these prestigious languages. The narrators of the text have some variable ironic distance from either possibility, so that you sometimes don’t know which one they’re going for—and maybe they don’t either. I really liked that about the book. So, we obviously wanted to keep this quality in the translation, but the impact of the English in particular would be lost in a mostly-English text, right? So we thought that adding some Spanish back into the text would kind of compensate for this.
But, of course, having a little English in a Spanish-language book and having a little Spanish in an English-language book are not the same thing. Relationships between languages and literatures are asymmetrical, and so this decision to replicate this formal aspect of the text, if in a mirrored way, might produce a pretty different effect for the reader of the English edition than that of the Spanish. In particular, Spanish in an English text does less work of class signification than vice-versa, but might do more work for specificity of time and place, like you mentioned, Fede—especially the porteñisms, or the slang specific to the Buenos Aires area. This is convenient because Berlín Atomizado is full of these, which can’t really be replicated in English. Language use is always rooted in a specific time, place, and social situation. While we certainly played with the voices in the English-language text to try and make them feel similar to the voices in the Spanish, we can’t literally make them sound like they’re from Buenos Aires in the way that they absolutely do in Spanish. So, keeping some Spanish in the text presents this other, new possible way to approach this problem of location in translation.
It’s not the same thing, but I think that difference is okay. This is also what made it so exciting to work with the author on the translation, because we could really look at the whole text and make decisions about where to put fragments in different languages, play around with them a bit, and try new things. We got some pushback against this multilinguality of the text on earlier drafts. A few early readers were confused, or told us in earlier versions that it was too much, that they wanted to know what they were missing behind the Spanish. It certainly took some calibrating to strike the right balance between the vibe we wanted and, frankly, intelligibility, but I really like where it ended up.
Federico Perelmuter is a writer. He lives in Buenos Aires.
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